When Mitt Romney was a college freshman, he told fellow residents of his Stanford University dormitory that he sometimes disguised himself as a police officer—a crime in many states, including Michigan and California, where he then lived. And he had the uniform on display as proof.
So recalls Robin Madden, who had also just arrived as a freshman, the startling incident began when Romney called him and two or three other residents into his room, saying, "Come up, I want to show you something." When they entered Romney's room, "and laid out on his bed was a Michigan State Trooper's uniform."…
Said Madden in a recent interview, "He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father," George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. "He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler."
In Madden's recollection, confirmed by his wife Susan, who also attended Stanford during those years, "we thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, 'Wow, that's pretty creepy.' And after that, we didn't have much interaction with him."
On the "How much should this affect your opinion of a candidate?" scale, I rank this allegation higher than "when he was eight someone served him some dog" and lower than "favors extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens."
Don't expect the exhumations of the candidates' pasts to end anytime soon. I'm just hoping there's some way the competing oppo research teams can surprise everyone by bumping into each other. Maybe Kid Romney fake-arrested Kid Obama for smoking weed.
